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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29812998">At Civil Twilight</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/lieutenant_isaac/pseuds/lieutenant_isaac'>lieutenant_isaac</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Civil Twilight [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Terror (TV 2018)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Apologizing too much, Belated return of a historically accurate misdelivered package, Carnivale (The Terror), Gen, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 07:56:18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,993</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29812998</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/lieutenant_isaac/pseuds/lieutenant_isaac</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“Well,” said Francis. “Jopson, will you see what you can do with this three-year-old peace offering? A cup for each of us, and one for you.”</p><p>“Sir,” said Jopson, collecting one of the bags. “You’ll be up all night if you take coffee now.”</p><p>“I’ll be up all night anyway. Go, Jopson, go.”</p><p>When he was gone, Francis got up from the table, and they stared into the depths of the bag together. Finally, Francis cleared his throat and said, “All right, then, James. How have you fared since I hit you?”</p><p> </p><p>A few days after Carnivale, Crozier and Fitzjames make a faltering attempt to talk things over.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Civil Twilight [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2243937</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>35</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>At Civil Twilight</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>James Fitzjames had always loved evenings best. They were fragrant with possibility: bright sparks in the street, a dash of mud on your boot, drinking a highball at someone’s club before the opera. He felt more secure in the evening, aware that his handsome face was blurrier, shot like a star through a fogged sextant. As he walked from <i>Erebus</i> to <i>Terror</i>, he could not help but thrill to the quality of the light. His body knew no more of his misery than it did the true time of day – barely four in the afternoon.</p><p>Jopson answered the door of the great cabin, very tidy and correct, though James saw charred grease beneath his fingernails and a blue pallor beneath his face. The room behind him smelled of shit and bile, and a glance at Jopson – and at Francis, already sitting at the roped-up table with a forced smile like something extruded – told him that neither of them could smell it anymore; they were too used to it. He felt his face twitch with it as he carefully put down the pack.</p><p>“What have you got there, James? You look ready to trek south today.”</p><p>He mutely unlaced the pack and began to pull out his wares. “Something I’ve owed you for a long time. Your goods from Fortnum’s, which as you know were misdelivered to me.”</p><p>“It’s my bloody coffee,” said Francis in disbelief. He had half risen, but then settled down again. “After all this time.”</p><p>“And your tea and your sugar.” He paused. The truth of it was that he’d added the sugar himself, three large canisters from his own stores, because it had felt so horribly on the nose to bring only coffee and tea. “Some of it was consumed in various fits of pique over the past year. But I’m afraid that much of the time, I simply forgot it was there.”</p><p>“Well,” said Francis. “Jopson, will you see what you can do with this three-year-old peace offering? A cup for each of us, and one for you.”</p><p>“Sir,” said Jopson, collecting one of the bags. “You’ll be up all night if you take coffee now.”</p><p>“I’ll be up all night anyway. Go, Jopson, go.”</p><p>When he was gone, Francis got up from the table, and they stared into the depths of the bag together. Finally, Francis cleared his throat and said, “All right, then, James. How have you fared since I hit you?”</p><p>James shook his head. “We both have much for which to apologize.”</p><p>“We do. And we would apologize all night if we went down the list.”</p><p>James looked at his face, made loose and plain by strain. It seemed an empty face, nothing behind it but wood. The real things they needed to discuss – the things he knew he’d been summoned to discuss – seemed everywhere and nowhere in the room, sitting beneath the surface of each wall and stick of furniture; he had but to rub the facade away to see the flesh of them. The smell of bile in the room seemed, if anything, to grow stronger.</p><p>Jopson returned with a steaming tray, set the cups on the table. The two men picked them up with relief at having something to do with their hands. Francis took a cautious sip, like a man testing a butler’s proffered wine at a fine dinner, and nodded to Jopson. “It’s good.”</p><p>“I think the beans had been frozen in the hold, sir. They’ve been preserved well.”</p><p>Francis patted Jopson’s arm. “Please go and take yours in your cabin.”</p><p>Jopson withdrew and Francis took another sip of the scalding drink. James took some of his, too; it was hot, but very weak. </p><p>“He’s trying to protect me from myself again,” said Francis in a confiding tone. </p><p>“It’s too early to joke to that effect,” said James, half interrupting him.</p><p>Francis grimaced down at his cup. “I am trying to be civil with you.”</p><p>“Did you summon me here to be civil, or to hear my report on the time you’ve missed?”</p><p>“Your <i>report</i> is –” said Francis, in the barreling tone with which he always began his tirades, and then grimaced again. “Yes. I summoned you here to be civil. And to apologize, James. For all of it. I know there is no way you can ever trust me, not now. I’ve lain with that knowledge for weeks and it rests no more easily in me.”</p><p>“What were you going to say about my report?”</p><p>“Oh.” Francis glanced out the stern window; across the moonlit ice, the broken stain of the tent was clearly visible. “I thought better of it.”</p><p>“If it was to say that you saw my <i>report</i> on Saturday morning, consumed in flames –”</p><p>“I saw Dr. Stanley on Saturday morning, consumed in flames,” said Francis, his voice riding up over James’, “and it was the most dreadful thing I’ve seen all winter, not excepting poor Thomas and his leg, and all the things I saw during my weeks of illness. And I say to you, James, that you are <i>not</i> Dr. Stanley, and you don’t need to punish yourself as if you were.”</p><p>This was an unexpected tack and James looked at him over their coffees. His tone had been angry enough, but in a wavering, partly controlled way, and his face was frank and sad. I wonder, James reflected, if anyone has ever called you Frank.</p><p>“Dr. Stanley had a bad war,” said James. “His friends tell me he was never the same, but I had never known him before. I don’t understand why a man who devoted himself to saving lives –”</p><p>“<i>Yes</i>, you do, of <i>course</i> you do. What I don’t understand is why he would take another man’s choice from him.” Francis pushed himself up and began to pace the room. “If he could not bear this life anymore, I understand. Truly, I do. But I have nothing but disgust for his choice to destroy others who might not have felt that way. While they were celebrating, James. While they were celebrating.”</p><p>“I know, I know,” James chanted under his breath. “I don’t disagree.”</p><p>“So when I ask you how you fare, I know that answer too.” Francis sat down heavily back across from James, and straightened his uniform. “Myself, I feel like a scream, manifested as a person.”</p><p>“I feel like a man who’s just thrown a party with a butcher’s bill,” said James, “whatever the cause or culpability.”</p><p>Francis gave a long sigh, and his face stilled again. “Have I ever told you – no, of course I haven’t. I’ve never told you a story. Would you care to hear a story?”</p><p>James gestured impatiently. “Why not.”</p><p>“When we were frozen in in Antarctica – happily, for what turned out to be a brief time – Sir James Ross, or plain Captain Ross that was, determined that we should have a party.” Francis gave a brief smile, just a baring of the teeth. “Specifically, a fancy ball. To keep the men’s spirits up – as <i>you</i> worked so hard to do. James was like you in an additional way, which is that he didn’t need an excuse to put on a frock.” He leaned forward, his tension dissolving for a moment in the memory. “Although what you had on was more of a toga, I’d say. What was it made of?”</p><p>“Most of it was a costume of Caesar, but the skirt started life as a curtain.”</p><p>“James’ frock was stitched together from sails. Well, he demanded that he and I should open the ball, and that I should lead him in a dance. A quadrille, specifically. He was bent on it; he even shaved his beard.” Francis' fingertip absently stroked his own stubble. “The trouble was that the man <i>can’t</i> dance. He’s got by for forty years on the rote habit of leading, but, uh, I could not teach him to follow. I am a fair dancer and could lead or follow, and for about thirty seconds, he wanted <i>me</i> to put on the frock, but I smothered him in his own vanity until he subsided. In the end, he learned his steps, and Miss Ross took the ball by storm.” Francis’ mouth twitched briefly.</p><p>“He must seem very far away to you,” said James.</p><p>“A world away,” said Francis, and drained his coffee in a long gulp, putting it glassily down. </p><p>“A man would give a good deal for such a friend.”</p><p>“He is a brother to me.” But now, after the sudden light of the story – and he’d told it well, with all the right inflections and gestures, but with an absence on his eyes that settled on no one nearer than London – he seemed to have lost his speech. </p><p>“My brother,” said James, “my brother – “ But he could not talk about William Coningham now, with his neurasthenia, his fits of art collecting, his Radicalism and his love. He didn’t know why he had said the word. He scratched at his cheek to hide his distress, tried out a smile, and suddenly could no longer bear this parody of a social visit – could not bear Francis’ attempts to make it up to him, to cover years of bitter words and table-slamming and simple cruelty, like the time he’d let <i>Erebus</i> lead <i>Terror</i> the wrong way for a whole day rather than tell James he was about to make a fool of himself. But then he looked up and saw that Francis knew his thoughts as well as he.</p><p>“You don’t have to do this,” said Francis. “I don’t want to be your friend. That is, I can’t press a friendship out of a man with my hands.” He was heating up, flushing, eyes closing as if in pain. “I am simply so terribly sorry.”</p><p>“Look,” said James, “come outside the ship and walk with me for a little while.”</p><p>Francis shook his head in incomprehension. “Why, James?”</p><p>“Indulge me.”</p><p>Still shaking his head, Francis stood, pulled on his slop parka which had been draped over another of the chairs, and took up his heavy mittens and scarf. It was mild outside – above twenty degrees – and Francis paused to give instructions to Edward Little, reading in his cabin with the door open, before following James out. </p><p>They tramped onto the ice, James adjusting the shotgun he’d automatically picked up at the cabin door. He wondered if Little had given Francis back his service pistol, if he’d seen him walk the deck yet in full uniform – he would never forget the way Francis had said those three words. He asked him out of nowhere, “Do you know <i>Kubla Khan</i>?”</p><p>“Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!” Francis recited. “Why?”</p><p>“A stray thought only.” He’d expected Francis to come out with the pleasure-dome or the sunless sea, but the man was full of surprises today.</p><p>They walked towards the remains of the tent. In the fresh, glittering moonlight, the sight of it was a stain – James had thought continually of drawing it, and had concluded again and again that it was its own drawing already, charcoal on white. He stopped where the path opened up and took his gun into his hands, scenting the fresh air.</p><p>“If you’ve brought me here to shoot me,” said Francis, “you could have let me bring a second.”</p><p>James felt his compressed face smile a little, despite itself. “I <i>am</i> your second.”</p><p>“Then who is the challenger, hm?”</p><p>“According to Thomas Blanky, we will know who the challengers are soon enough.”</p><p>“You’ve been listening to Thomas, then? Good.”</p><p>“The man possesses wisdom beyond his sixty years.”</p><p>“Christ, James, do you take him for sixty? For what do you take me?”</p><p>James felt warm, blessed glibness descend on him. “For a man trying to change.”</p><p>“Do you really believe that?”</p><p>“Yes,” said James. “Well, I believe you are trying.”</p><p>“Ah, good,” said Francis. “That’s less pat.”</p><p>“The truth may be pat as often as not. I’ve known what you were for years, and you have tried for just as long to make that complicated when it is <i>very</i> simple.”</p><p>Francis nodded, looking at the scene, a faint aurora throwing its green reflection on the ice. Eventually he said, “I’ve done this before.”</p><p>“When?”</p><p>“Before Antarctica.”</p><p>“Did it hold?”</p><p>“Obviously it did not hold, James. But this time, it <i>must</i> be different.” Francis shook his head. “After Antarctica, the Navy quietly sent me to travel in Italy and France --”</p><p>“I knew you were in Italy when you heard of the ships being fitted out. You hastened to write to take your place on <i>Terror</i>.”</p><p>“That is not the entire story,” said Francis. “I was, in fact, ordered to go.”</p><p>“You’ve told me this,” said James, as gently as he could. </p><p>Francis nodded, once, his face taking on a firmer set. “Have I told you that before that – before command was offered to Sir John – it was offered to me?”</p><p>“No. No one has told me that.”</p><p>“I turned it down,” Francis said. “Because of what I felt, and still feel, was my entire unfitness to lead. I wasn’t in Italy for my edification, James. I was sent away in the hope that I would dry out again, away from England and the many temptations of fame.”</p><p>“Fame, I know, holds no temptations for you.”</p><p>“It tempted me to blow my brains out more often than not. But they trusted me enough to send me as captain of <i>Terror</i>.” He whirled on James, his eyebrow shooting up like a raised sail. “Perhaps they thought that Sir John’s temperance would check me, and that my experience on the polar seas would check him.”</p><p>“And whom was I sent to check, Francis?”</p><p>“Perhaps you were sent here to find the Passage, James.”</p><p>James sighed, lulled despite himself by the beauty of the lights. He thought, as he could still think in his brighter moments: for now, I am alive. Whatever is happening to my body, I am alive and breathing now, and there is still time for things to change. </p><p>“I will never forget your faces,” said Francis now, scuffling restlessly at the snow. “I remember almost nothing of that night – Jopson had to tell me that I’d struck you. But I remember your face, and how it was twisted – your mouth to the side, so.” Francis tried to imitate the expression, came up with something more like a moue; his large mouth did not care to be put there. “I saw it on all of you, even Thomas. You didn’t believe me. You were tired of my promises, and you wanted to go home to bed. And you were surly with it. You didn’t care if I saw.”</p><p>“Francis, you have apologized and apologized, but you can’t erase what you did.”</p><p>“I know.” Francis raised a defensive hand. “I said. I know --”</p><p>“Any more than I can erase Carnivale,” he pressed on. “And everything Carnivale is – a lark, a party, gear ill-used and stores wasted, all the wrong people, all the – the <i>disrespect</i> of it, the actions of a man who thought he could conquer the north with one roar of his mighty voice. I have not slept since that night. I know I will dream of it. You are lucky not to be taking whiskey from my store today; you would have found it sadly depleted. I drank through your absence, in fact, swallowing Sir John’s leftover liquor and trying on costumes in the hold.”</p><p>“James, James. James.” Once he was quieted, Francis shook his head, unable to speak further. James remembered the Francis he’d seen that evening at the theater – stiff and awkward, driven back into his chair as if by a blow at the clap of the audience’s applause, the whole dreadful evening a failed attempt to make friends of enemies, and Sophia Cracroft, so lovely – and how Francis’ face had opened for her, grown handsome and sleek, an explorer’s face at last. Or had it opened for both of them, Miss Cracroft and Sir James?</p><p>At last Francis said, “No matter how much you may drink, you could not drink like me.” It had the air, once again, of not being what he’d wanted to say. “You haven’t got it in you, James. Arrogance and youth depart in their time –”</p><p>James shook his head. “My youth is long since departed, as you can see.”</p><p>“Not really. But I am interested to meet the man it leaves behind. Yes?”</p><p> James nodded mutely. </p><p>“The dreams are not so dreadful,” Francis added, reaching a hesitant hand to James’ shoulder. They stood like that for a long moment. Francis’ body, he realized, was recreating what it had felt like to dance with Sir James Ross, though in the quadrille no one’s body touches. He put his own hand to Francis’s wrist, held it there for a count of three, and gently detached it. The two of them turned to leave.  </p><p>“I am so very tired,” James said, as they picked their way along the path of ice. “I thought I was tired at Hickey’s court-martial.”</p><p>“I know,” said Francis. “We were fools then. We didn’t know the meaning of tired.”</p><p>“And we will look back on today, more tired still.”</p><p>“Don’t do that. You were sent here to keep our spirits <i>up</i>, James.”</p><p>“Well, now the truth comes out.”</p><p>“I remember you once told me to 'try and shake the brown study.' Tell me, in all your life, have you ever been in a brown study you couldn’t shake?”</p><p>“Not till now,” said James. “But I am shaking with all the force I can muster.”</p><p>“I shall watch you do it, then,” said Francis, “and try to benefit from your example.”</p><p>“You need to get the last word in, don’t you, even if we are being civil?”</p><p>Francis exhaled silent laughter; he gave James a faint smile, and spoke no more.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I think it's formally brilliant that the show omits this whole period of time, and that it refuses to foreshadow the iconic "are we brothers?" scene. Next-level pacing work. That said, I’m the guy who pokes at the wound, so here we are.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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